Friday, March 22, 2013

Surrogacy, religious fanatics, and liberty

The Minnesota Family Council apparently hates infertile couples who
seek help in starting families. In North Dakota, they’re trying to
abolish fertility procedures AND to outlaw some of the most popular
forms of contraception.

Approximately 60,000 babies are born through In Vitro Fertilization aka IVF. The ethics committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, back in 2009, " found no persuasive evidence that children are harmed or disadvantaged
solely by being raised by single parents, unmarried parents, or
homosexual parents. It did not support restricting access to assisted
reproductive technologies on the basis of a prospective parent's marital
status or sexual orientation."

The legislators from the religious right that, sadly, dominate the legislature of North Dakota don't care what the science and scientists, the experts, have to say. They want to oppress people with their beliefs, in their minds for our own good, no matter how evil they are in practice.

I’m struck by how the right, despite their abuse of the word Freedom,
are consistently the ones who try to trample the rights of other
people. They believe, apparently, that they are superior to the rest of
us, that their imaginary moral superiority entitles them to force their
religious beliefs on everyone else. The reality is that they have NO
moral superiority, and that they have no justification either in belief
or in science for coercing anyone else to conform to their ugly ideals.
The right doesn’t even conform to their own ideals. The party that
asserts they are against big government, intrusive government, are the
hypocrites who are expanding government, and expanding that intrusion.

This is not only the action of a party that trusts people to make
their own decisions, to act according to their own moral compass; this
is the party of prudes who hate and fear sex, and fail to show any
factual understanding of it. This is the party that distrusts people to
think for themselves, that punishes anyone who defies their efforts to
coerce conformity. The right is not in any way shape or form the party
of liberty, patriotism or personal freedom. It tries to remove freedom
to control our own bodies, make our own decisions, or to respect REAL
religious freedom of conscience. The right is the party of superstition
that attributes hurricanes to human sexuality.

No intelligent person should vote for people who make such badly
informed decisions that have such destructive and unsuccessful
outcomes.The Minnesota Family Council uses the motto “strengthening
families, advancing truth” but does neither. In a mass email mailing
earlier this week on surrogacy. Surrogacy allows infertile couples to
have children, either their own children through in vitro fertilization
of the mother’s ova and the father’s spermatozoa, or through the use of
one parent’s contribution with donor material, either egg or sperm,
using a host mother. Ive known women who have been host mothers to
other people’s embryos from IVF. I’ve known families with IVF kids. It
is NOTHING like their fear mongering in this email:

Please, contact members of the Minnesota Senate Judiciary
Committee and ask them to oppose SF 370 which gives legal effect to
surrogacy agreements, “baby selling” in Minnesota. A hearing on this
bill will happen Thursday or Friday of this week, so there is no time to
waste.What is surrogacy? Surrogacy agreements are
between person(s) who hire a woman to use her uterus to carry and
deliver a child for another couple or persons.What’s the problem with surrogacy?

Children are treated as commodities to be bought and sold.

Surrogacy agreements exploit women for reproductive purposes.
Surrogates are usually poor, low income women who sell their
reproductive abilities for cash.

This bill includes no regulation of the surrogate process, e.g.
background checks on intended parents under the contract, criminal
checks, health considerations, all done in the adoption process to
ensure the best interests off child are protected.

What would this bill do?

This bill would allow the party to an agreement to take the
birth mother to court for custody of the children she carried in her
womb and has bonded with for nine months.

Currently, state law views the birth mother as the mother of
the child. This bill would treat children as commodities for sale
under a contract.

The bill gives legal effect to surrogacy agreements which haven’t been recognized by Minnesota courts.

Do we do any kind of bacground checks before parents conceive NOW?
No. Do you want to see every pregnancy have that kind of intrusion? No.
What is this REALLY about? In part it is about preventing single
parents and same sex couples from having children, just as the bigoted
homophobes on the right try to obstruct same sex oriented individuals
and couples from adopting. No state law, no change in the proposed
legislation treats human beings as a commodity; we DO need legal
recognition of surrogate agreements to protect all parties concerned
including the children. But the notion that low income women are being
exploited for this process is unsupported by any evidence, as is the
notion that this turns reproduction into a commodity. This isn’t about
protecting anyone; this is about an attempt to use the legal process to
try to harass a group of people the conservatives hate and malign.

In the same time period, in NoDak next door, we have the attempt to
pass a fetal personhood law which would do the same thing – eliminate
fertility clinic service. Consistently, the majority of Americans
support the right to an abortion and to easily accessible, affordable
contraception. The actions of groups like those in North Dakota and in
Minnesota to oppose that right succeeds not because they are the
majority but because they are a rabid, fanatical extremist minority.
According to the STrib earlier this week:

Dr. Stephanie Dahl, a Fargo infertility specialist, said
Monday that the personhood measures could ban in vitro fertilization and
force doctors to leave the state rather than face health care
restrictions or possible criminal penalties. In vitro fertilization, or
IVF, involves mixing egg and sperm in a laboratory dish and transferring
resulting embryos into the womb.
“This is something that would affect the patient and doctor
relationship,” Dahl said at a news conference with a group of doctors
who oppose the measures. “That’s somewhere we want to keep the
government out of.” Legislators claim that they don’t wish to end IVF,
but clearly many on the right do want to end this reproductive option.
As the Strib further noted, the reproductive medical community rejects
these assurances because of the efforts to criminalize aspects of the
process, “But Dr. Steffen Christensen, who founded an in vitro
fertilization clinic in Fargo 19 years ago, said he can’t put himself or
his workers at risk of legal action. The concern is that this is
criminal negligence if anything should happen to an embryo,” he said.”

The Strib went on to note:

Opponents also noted that the North Dakota Medical
Association is against the bill and a group of 26 students from the
University of North Dakota medical school signed a letter to the state
Senate against it.
Dr. Ted Kleiman, a Fargo pediatrician, said the law would set North Dakota back to “the stone age” of medicine.
“This is abhorrent in the highest degree,” he said.

Banning abortions and the end of fertility services in North Dakota
would mean more women, more couples, coming to Minnesota for those
services. Ending such services here or restricting them would affect
not only Minnesota but our larger region.

Other legislation passed in North Dakota restricts abortion to six
weeks, well before some women even know they are pregnant – women
athletes for example often have irregular or missed menstrual cycles –
and forces women to carry to term regardless of rape, incest, or the
life or health of the mother. North Dakota is also one of the 31 states
that give rapists parental rights to their children conceived through
rape, allowing the rapist to prevent the mother from seeking an abortion
from rape, and forcing her to share custody throughout the child’s
life. What kind of a father do you think a rapist would be? Other states
have tried formally to strip rapists of any parental rights, but not
those states which see it as a way to obstruct the right to an abortion.

Here’s a hint to those who want to see families protected – value
women. Don’t force women to give birth, don’t give rapists parental
rights, don’t complicate or criminalize abortion or surrogacy. Respect
ALL families, because same sex parents are good parents single parents
can be great parents. Those who do not make good families are people
who are forced or coerced into parenthood. There are plenty of
heterosexual couples who are terrible parents; sexual orientation is not
a goo predictor of parenting or family success. While two parent
households, either same sex or heterosexual, tend to be better for kids,
there are other factors that are more critical than number of gender or
sexual orientation of parents to successful parenting and healthy happy
families.

The right needs to be told to butt the hell out of people’s lives,
their medical decisions, their relationships with doctors, clergy and
family members. THAT is not the appropriate role of government. That is
the worst kind of BIG government, intrusive government. They are the
worst kind of intrusion of fear, intolerance, ignorance, superstition,
and the rejection of science. Respect ALL people, all families, and
especially respect women if you want healthy children, healthy
relationships, healthy well-adjusted adults. The right wing way is the
way of oppression, hatred, and it is just plain wrong in every respect.
We must oppose the tyranny of conservative prejudice and ignorance
and superstition. Most of all we need to end the tyranny of
conservatives over women and our bodies.

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